The most reliable way to avoid a hangover is to drink less alcohol, but if you’re going to drink, several evidence-based strategies can meaningfully reduce how rough you feel the next day. Hangovers typically peak right around the time your blood alcohol level drops back to zero and can linger for up to 24 hours after that point. What you eat, what you drink, which alcohol you choose, and what you do afterward all influence the outcome.
Eat a Real Meal Before You Drink
Food in your stomach slows the rate at which alcohol enters your bloodstream. Eating before or during drinking reduces your peak blood alcohol concentration, decreases absorption, and slows metabolism. High-energy meals (think protein, fats, and carbs together) are particularly effective at slowing things down and reducing how intoxicated you feel.
Interestingly, research from the Journal of Clinical Medicine found that the old advice about eating specifically fatty or fiber-rich foods didn’t hold up as a hangover-specific remedy. What matters more is that you eat a substantial meal at all. A burger, a plate of pasta, or eggs and toast before going out will do more for you than drinking on an empty stomach and hoping for the best. The goal is to avoid a sharp spike in blood alcohol, because that spike drives many of the downstream effects that make mornings miserable.
Choose Your Drinks Carefully
Not all alcohol punishes you equally. The key variable is congeners: toxic byproducts created during fermentation and aging. Darker, more complex spirits contain far more of them. Bourbon, for example, contains two to three times the congener load of scotch whiskey, largely because of its high isobutanol content (400 to 600 mg/mL compared to around 200 mg/mL in scotch). Wine and beer also carry appreciably higher congener levels than distilled spirits in general.
Vodka is considered the “cleanest” option, with the fewest congeners and the least hangover potential per unit of alcohol. If you’re trying to minimize next-day damage, clear spirits like vodka and gin are a better bet than whiskey, red wine, or brandy. This doesn’t mean vodka can’t give you a hangover. Drink enough of anything and you’ll pay for it. But at equal amounts, your choice of beverage matters.
Pace Yourself and Hydrate Between Drinks
Alcohol is a diuretic. It suppresses a hormone that tells your kidneys to retain water, so you lose fluid faster than you’re taking it in. This dehydration contributes to headaches, fatigue, and dizziness the next day. Alternating each alcoholic drink with a glass of water slows your overall intake and offsets some of the fluid loss. It won’t eliminate a hangover, but it softens the blow considerably.
Pacing also matters because your liver can only process roughly one standard drink per hour. When you outpace that rate, alcohol and its toxic breakdown products accumulate, and you’re essentially loading up on the compounds that cause hangover symptoms. Spreading your drinks out over more hours, even if the total number stays the same, gives your body time to keep up.
What to Do Before Bed
The window between your last drink and sleep is your best remaining opportunity to reduce tomorrow’s damage. Drink water, but don’t force yourself to chug a liter. A tall glass or two is enough. Eating a small snack with some salt and carbohydrates helps replenish electrolytes and gives your body fuel for the overnight metabolic work of clearing alcohol.
If you want to take a painkiller preemptively, choose wisely. NSAIDs like ibuprofen are the safer option when alcohol is in your system. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is riskier because alcohol depletes your liver’s stores of a protective compound called glutathione, and without that buffer, acetaminophen can become toxic to liver cells. Acetaminophen toxicity accounts for nearly half of acute liver failure cases in North America. This doesn’t mean a single dose after a few beers will destroy your liver, but if you have the choice, ibuprofen is the more forgiving option. Just be aware it can irritate your stomach, which alcohol has already done a number on.
The Morning After
Hangover symptoms peak around the time your blood alcohol concentration hits zero, which for most people means late morning or early afternoon after a night of heavy drinking. This is when headache, nausea, fatigue, and brain fog are at their worst. From that point, symptoms can persist for up to 24 hours.
Rehydration is the first priority. Water, electrolyte drinks, and broth all help. Coffee can relieve a headache temporarily through caffeine’s effect on blood vessels, but it’s also a mild diuretic, so pair it with water. Eating bland, easy-to-digest food like toast, bananas, or rice gives your body glucose and nutrients it burned through overnight. There’s no magic “hangover cure” supplement with strong evidence behind it, despite what the marketing says. Your body needs time, fluids, and food.
What Actually Doesn’t Work
“Hair of the dog,” or drinking more alcohol the next morning, delays hangover symptoms rather than preventing them. You’re essentially pushing back the moment your blood alcohol hits zero, which is when symptoms peak. You’ll feel the same misery later, potentially worse, because you’ve added more alcohol for your body to process.
Greasy breakfast food after the fact doesn’t absorb alcohol (it’s long past your stomach by then), though it does provide calories and salt your body can use. The timing of the meal matters: eating before and during drinking has real physiological effects on absorption, while eating the next morning is just refueling. Still worth doing, just not for the reason most people think.
The Simplest Prevention Strategy
The dose makes the poison. Every strategy above helps at the margins, but the single biggest factor in whether you wake up hungover is how much you drank. Keeping to three or four drinks over several hours, on a full stomach, with water in between, choosing clear spirits: that combination is about as hangover-proof as a night of drinking gets. Each variable you ignore stacks the odds against you.